It's all the things, half the time, rather than half the things all the time

Who Reads This Stuff???

I’ve always kind of figured that, beyond the web crawlers, there aren’t very many, or any, real human beings reading this stuff. That’s pretty much ok with me, I’m writing this all down for my own therapy, and if someone enjoys reading it, that’s cool, and if not, well, that’s cool too.
But the stats are sometimes all over the place, and I haven’t been able to figure out what I’m doing, or not doing, or whatever to make the graph jump up 100% or 200% on a given day and then drop down to almost 0 on the next day. It doesn’t seem to correlate to posts, or days of the week, or anything I can think of, although I haven’t really put that much thought into it.

It appears to be pretty normal that 4 or 5 hits on pages will be crawlers. And I guess it would make sense that a crawler might occasionally traverse the posts, and make the hits jump up. It could be someone stumbling upon the blog, (it’s been here over a year, so there’s a few entries in Google), and going through a bunch of the pages. I’m just not sure.

On the techie side, there’s no listing (that I know of) of IP addresses visiting here, so there’s no way to know if they’re crawlers, or someone just clicking through all the pages, or even if the system understands that someone refreshing the same page doesn’t add up the “hits”.

Either way, while it’s odd, I think there’s something comforting in seeing that someone, or something stops by, and at least checks out the picture on the post. I’ve had a few comments, so I know someone is out there. And of course when you’re really desperate, you can always count spam comments as a visitor. 🙂